Microsoft to sell Teams app separately from Office 

Microsoft will begin selling its Teams video conferencing app separate from its Office software globally after making the change in Europe in August, the company announced Monday.  

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 will offer suites that do not include Teams and a stand-alone version of Teams to customers globally, the company said in a blog post.  

Customers already subscribed to any of the suites will have options to renew, use or upgrade their plans as usual, or switch to one of the new versions that unbundles the features.  

The changes first made in Europe came a month after the European Commission announced an investigation into anticompetitive practices by Microsoft over the bundling of the features.  

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally. Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.  

The change is separate from those dominant tech firms are making in response to other regulations put in place by Europe under the Digital Markets Act, which aims to add more competition to the tech industry.

Although the rules are only in place in Europe, experts have said the changes could lead to global impacts for users if the companies choose to add some of the regulations more broadly, as Microsoft did with the unbundling of Teams and Office suites in response to the unrelated pressure.